Conclusion

Abstract This programmatic conclusion brings together the dimensions of bliss and the sites of world-delegitimation and world-refusal assembled throughout the book: nomadism and mysticism, blackness and hidden divinity, magic and the mysteries, the bliss of lying on water and looking at the skies, and that of the all-consuming revolutionary fire. In dialogue with Sun Ra’s invocation of a “dark tradition,” the conclusion asks whether one may speak of a “counter-tradition” of bliss against the world. It then turns to the foreclosure of bliss by the nineteenth-century capitalist world and the waning of the Romantic impulse of bliss, suggesting that the early Marx’s vision of being-in-common inherits the antagonistic Romantic impulse. Finally, the conclusion contends that the entwined questions—How to insist on bliss without theodicizing it? and How to think the world without justifying it?—index a central philosophical problem that Schelling tries but ultimately fails to resolve.